Overview

Before the invention of printing in the 1500s, people kept each other up to date with news and gossip through personal letters. Members of formal organizations accomplished the same function through handwritten newsletters. Following the arrival of print in the sixteenth century, news publishing went through four distinct stages before it evolved into what we would recognize as a newspaper. The very first examples were not sheets of two or four pages made up into columns but news books, or news pamphlets, looking a lot like a book, with a title page. Only in the seventeenth century did news begin to be distributed regularly and frequently.

Background

The first stage in the evolution of newspapers was publication of a single story, called a relation. This kind of publication recounted an event long after it had occurred. For example, in 1619 Nathaniel Newberry...